Think About It: I have no doubt that if Hans Morgenthau were still alive today, Israel’s “diplomacy” would have flabbergasted him. Being inflexible and boorish simultaneously can be lethal.

In his classic book Politics Among Nations, Hans Morgenthau listed diplomacy
among the elements that make up the power of nations.

The Jewish American
international relations professor described the four main tasks of diplomacy as:
determining the state’s objectives in light of the power actually and
potentially available for their pursuit; assessing the objectives of other
nations and the power actually and potentially available for their pursuit;
determining to what extent the different objectives are compatible with each
other; and employing the means suited to the pursuit of the objectives which are
chosen.

One wonders what Morgenthau would have had to say about the new
twist given to the term “diplomacy” by Israel’s current leaders, which, as
suggested by several commentators, has been cynically mobilized by Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman as part of the
Likud-Beytenu elections campaign.

It is said that the Likud-Beytenu’s
American elections advisor, Arthur Finkelstein, reached the conclusion that his
clients can maximize their electoral support inter alia by means of an
aggressive “the world is against us,” “their attitude toward us today is the
same as their attitude towards the Jews during the Holocaust”
campaign.

The decision to humiliate, within the framework of diplomatic
circumstances, an Israeli academic of international standing, just because 10
years ago she signed a controversial but perfectly legitimate petition
concerning military service in the territories, is already the local touch,
contributed by National Security Adviser Ya’acov Amidror, as if to say: “Look
how we treat left-wing wimps – even if they are professors, whom the goyim seek
to honor.”

Of course, perhaps the cynical explanation is nothing but
“evil spirit,” and Netanyahu and Liberman are using diplomacy in accordance with
Morgenthua’s prescription – with well thought-out objectives and clear
cost-benefit calculations.

Let us look at the two examples from last
week.

On December 11, in reaction to the EU foreign ministers’ decision
of the previous day to condemn Israel for advancing plans to build in the E-1
zone, Liberman chose to launch a frontal attack on the Europeans, accusing them
of being soft with the Hamas, which constantly calls for the destruction of
Israel, and dealing with the threat to Israel’s existence as they had dealt with
the threat to the lives of the Jews back in the 1930s and 1940s, when Jews were
prevented from migrating to Palestine, and left to die in the concentration
camps.

Though he didn’t accuse the European of anti- Semitic motives,
Liberman did accuse them of acting on the basis of narrow interests, stating
that their opposition to the Israeli construction in the settlements was
“unbalanced and unjustified.”

The European reaction was one of anger and
dismay. Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs
and Security Policy, declared Liberman’s attack to be inappropriate, and
offensive to Europeans. It should be noted that the Europeans (and the Americans
as well, for that matter) have never accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s
settlement activities in what they regard as occupied territories, and every
addition to this activity – whether merely declaratory or accompanied by actual
construction– is condemned by them. Furthermore, they do not accept Israel’s
settlement activity to be the result of an existential need.

Israel need
not accept this European position, and may even reject it out of hand. However,
mentioning the Holocaust in this particular context is especially dissonant,
since if anything, Israel’s policy is viewed in Europe as expansionist rather
than existential, just as Germany’s search for lebensraum for the Germany people
was considered pure expansionism by the Allied powers during World War
II.

Though at the time of writing we do not know whether the EU will
implement some form of sanctions against Israel in general, or the Jewish
settlers in the West Bank in particular, we can definitely say that nothing good
is expected to result from this episode. What a shame Liberman didn’t resign
several days earlier.

Netanyahu’s decision to allow Amidror to get the
Germans to cancel their invitation to Prof. Rivka Feldhay to participate,
as part of an Israeli academic team, in his meeting with German Chancellor
Angela Merkel on December 6 (or was Amidror only executing Netanyahu’s
decision?) was also a piece of diplomatic folly, besides being a sad omen of
what the intellectual radical Left in Israel can expect in the four years after
the elections.

Netanyahu has an absolute right to object to petitions
such as the one that Feldhay signed 10 years ago. It would even have been
legitimate had he made his displeasure known to the Germans, without getting
them to cancel her invitation.

However, what he did was to declare a
boycott on the head of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. In
doing so he provided moral justification to anti-Israeli academics in Europe,
who call for the boycotting of Israeli academics, because of what they said,
didn’t say, or who they are.

If Merkel were the prime minister of any
country except Germany, her reaction would undoubtedly have been much harsher
than just to convey her best regards to Feldhay by means of her colleagues. How
all this serves Israel’s interests, only God knows.

Even though in 1975
Morgenthau said to an Israeli audience that “You should not apologize for being
inflexible, or deny that you are – but point with pride to your inflexibility
and your determination to continue living and to have the conditions that will
make your continued existence possible,” I have no doubt that if he were still
alive today, Israel’s “diplomacy” would have flabbergasted him. Being inflexible
and boorish simultaneously can be lethal.

But maybe Finkelstein is to
blame after all.

The writer is a former Knesset employee, who taught
international relations at the Hebrew University in the 1970s.

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